


Smoke Break

by Omeacatl



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Booth is the most miserable boy in the world, Communication, Communication Failure, Communication Success, Good Guy Seeley, Lack of Communication, M/M, Sort of an untouchable face vibe, Zack was grown in a lab
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:08:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26795632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omeacatl/pseuds/Omeacatl
Summary: They are clearly kind of friends.
Relationships: Zack Addy/Seeley Booth
Kudos: 11





	Smoke Break

The first time it happened he had had his back to the wall because he was demonstrating to God how much he appreciated it all un blown up and everything. A small thanksgiving for yet another close call that had almost cost them everything.  
What Bones had yet to discover was how much having God to thank let one never show how exhausted one was. Booth prayed with his eyes  
closed and gave anyone who made motions towards him a joke about holding up the wall.

"Dr. Brennan has a very colorful set of diagrams that demonstrate overall likely rates of real endorphin related enjoyment against physical degradation that doesn't come out in favor of this habit." Zack was watching Booth, which was, of all the things he would have preferred not to have, not the worst thing of those that had happened to him that night.

He closed his eyes and continued the drag on the cigarette. He held the smoke in his lungs feeling it like air during lifting weights. A resource to be drawn upon, conciously. He held it and looked back at Zack, his eyes almost closed with the strain that Zack always produced in him.  
Throw the cigarette away?  
He couldn't smack him, so he had to at least respond to the comment, but for all that he and Hodgins had something like their own territories mapped out between them he had never gotten past looking at Zack like a spider he was expecteted to talk to.

Zack was still looking at him, probably the only bright light in the akwardness was that he was infinitely forgiving of long pauses on the parts of others. Booth offered him a cigarette.

"We almost blew up Zack."  
"Does that make it better?" Zack took it and held it like a finger bone.

Booth was about to offer him a light when Zack pulled out a lighter of his own. "My dad used to say that the salt water made them better."

Booth stared as Zack lit it and took a deep drag, cupping his hand against the wind.

Zack looked back up at him. "I suspect it's the same principle as Bacon, and to a lesser degree soy sauce."

Booth closed his eyes again.

\------

The second time it happened he actually had to bum the lighter off of Zack, which was why he remembered he had wanted to ask about it.

"So you do something Bones doesn't approve of?"

Zack handed him the lighter without complaint, and took a moment to reflect on the question. He didn't get offended which Booth had known he wouldn't. Zack had stated before that offense was a foreign quantity to him, in something close to those words.

"I do several things that Dr. Brennan does not do. I am uncomfortable with group sex for instance."

Booth startled, "What?"

"I was illustrating a dissimiliarity between my habits and Dr. Brennans, as the underthrust of your question seemed to be a suggestion that I am closely tailored to her specifications.  
I couldn't think of another offhand example of my positive transgression against a private ban of hers however, so I substituted an example of my lacking a characteristic that she has." Zac frowned and caught up with himself a little, "But I am sometimes very bad at identifying the undercurrents of conversation, so it is possible both or either that my improvisational replacement for a direct analog to your identified point of dissimiliarity was too radical to come across as cleanly connecting the statements or that you did not mean to imply that larger connection."

Zack nodded, distracted, as he lit his own cigarette and inhaled. When he exhaled he gestured as though summing up.

"Yes, I do something that Dr. Brennan does not approve of. I am sorry also if you were offput by my candor with respect to what is ordinarily (or often) considered her personal life. I thought of that one while smoking."

Booth looked at him and waited for some other clarification. When none came he volunteered,"Yeah, no, it was the last one."

Zack nodded and said, "I have noticed that you tend to be most accurately described by what I personally estimate as the least likely in any given calculi. I think that means perhaps it is very difficult for us to be friends."

\-------

"Dr. Brennan told me you said you liked Clark Eddison when he said that he was called 'Bones' in college by his friends."

Booth suspended his normal flags for motive. He had learned enough to wait for the explanation rather than try his first shot.

Zack watched his subject for reaction and found none, so he continued, hoping to stumble on whatever it was that will convey to the other man what he wanted to tell him.

"That kind of accepts the premise that nicknaming is a feature of intimate relationships - a technique further used by Dr. Ceryoyan, for instance - but that rejects your claim that you display similar behavior toward me when you don't speak to me."  
Still nothing that he would call recognition. Zack tried again.  
"She also said that you trapped Clark Eddison socially in order to embarass him. Which confuses the issue for me, because if I believe the report that you liked him I have to re-evaluate the use of that kind of maneuvar," Booth motioned in the negative, aborting a gesture with his hand as Zack continued, forstalling him, "Which comports with 'romantic comedy' in a way, I understand 'social roughhousing,' -- its the other thing that I have the larger trouble with."  
Booth shook his head, trying to be helpful, smoking beside the kid who was asking him.. something.

"I don't understand why you aren't still sleeping with Dr. Ceryoyan."

Booth waited to see if it was another tangent, but this time Zack just kept looking at him, smoking his cigarette, apparently at the provisional end of whatever thought he was trying to translate for Booth.

He shook his head, scuffed the butt with his shoe. "Nope, sorry man. No clue what you're talking about and you creep me the fuck out."

\-------

Number four was later that day, to make sure that his unaffected honesty hadn't this time actually gotten to the kid. It wasn't that he had feelings nearly so much as high-functioning generally theoretic models of them. Still they were predictable and sometimes you could 'run afoul of them' or put them into a.. downcycle. Or whatever.

Booth tendered his apology-substitute in the form of coffee and being the one of them to catch the others eye and look for the door during a time when there was nothing to pour over or beat up until it told someone answers.

Zack explained that it had been two things dovetailing, and Booth tried to keep up, because it had been awhile since he had last really attempted it. He had explained when they first got outside the building that he looked at his attempts to keep up as a quantity of which he possessed a finite amount in store.  
Zack had nodded, showing some evidence of a greater resolve than he had in the past.  
Resolve substitute.  
Whatever.

Booth returned his attention to him.

"I was trying to describe strategies for us being friends, since Dr. Brennan has also revealed to me that you were a sports player and think that way, which I was reminded of by the notion of Clark-Edison's friendships in college. But I began implementing it earlier than I described it to you in full and I am terrified of you so it came out strangely. The strategy involved large amounts of candor, among other things."

Booth laughed out loud, through the fatigue poisons of yet another marathon investigation of fucking some unfathomable shit. "Zack you can't actually be scared of me. You're my partner's partner. You're my in-partner. We work together."

Zack's eyes brightened. "I also think of us as primarily related through her! That was why I was returning to the theme of her with my comment - you sleep with neither Dr. Saroyan nor Dr. Brennan, I also sleep with neither, but while I understand all (or enough to seem complete to me) of the cancellations responsible, I can't think of anything that accounts for you not sleeping with her anymore, and I think that you aren't."  
He nodded to himself. "Oh. And I am scared of you in a social way, you are more cunning and have a larger 'starting hand' of influence with which to be charismatic than I do in any game that comes up between us in that respect. And you don't like me very much and I am intimidated socially easily, so."

"I'll try to be less charming."

"Thank you. It might help. Anyway it was the partnership element of your relationship that I was speculating on when I got distracted from the strategization element of my intended comment and became concerned with that map of internal relations in the lab. Your partnership with her seems to fulfill you completely as a relationship, so I believe totally that you aren't interested in sleeping with Dr. Brennan, and she seems genuinely more concerned with her own automonomy than with any external relationship so I believe the converse to hold." He looked up to see if Booth was still following, which he wasnt.

"Ok, so, when you lie to me about it being good that you ignore me, are you trying to do that? Include me, but as like, a stooge in the staged events necessary for social interactions? Or are you doing it because I am really supposed to stop talking to you? Because I can do that. I could about as completely be content with my role as Dr. Brennan's familiar as you make do with your role as her partner. I can very easily adjust the level of empathetic peerhood I ascribe to others. My friends at home sometimes joked about it, but I detected a degree of nervousness in those jokes due to the extreme ease that I exhibit in that capacity."

For a moment Booth's hand went to his gun, some seminar hammered home reflex in him yelling 'Serial Killer!' at the tone of Zack's voice before he had totally translated the question in his head. Zack grinned, but his eyes were wider than usual and his hands were below his hips at his side. He had moved into melee range of Booth, but his shaved head really did look pitiful.  
Booth rolled his eyes before he caught himself, made himself lower his hand and take a breath while he stepped on the cigarette. "I guess I don't know all the time Zack? Ok? Now can you stop pretending you don't know it creeps the fuck out of me when we talk about sex? I have no idea how to give you what you want."

Zack nodded. "Im sorry. I think of like, anenomes? I have to exude poison in order to signal my potential for predatorhood. It confuses me more than animism but sometimes I feel like the problem is 90% lexical."

Booth looked at him. "Lexical is vocabulary right?"

Zack nodded, smiling, "Yes!"

Booth watched him step on his own cigarette, trying the same heel twist with moderate success.

\----------

Booth was looking up animism between horse-fetishist evidence breakthroughs.  
At some point he saw Zack walk toward him but he didn't have a folder or weapon in his hands.  
His right hand found his pocket and patted it as he stood.

\----------

"Animism?"  
Zack looked at him like it was the most serious important thing he had ever said and Booth almost threw the cigarette on the ground - Zack took him in in a glance and jumped back - "No! No, You were right! Im just happy that it worked. That was one of the least serious things I said! Ok. Ok. I can do this."

He drew a breath of the smoke, blew it out, put his back to the wall then stepped off it holding roughly the same muscle configuration.  
"I like old beliefs like that because of sci-fi. Fiction is really just the other half of science? See, physics and the hard sciences and mathematics - all the evidentiary ones, are the ways the universe could work that it actually happens to. Fiction is all the ways that it could that it doesn't. Like. Um." He reviewed in his head whether Booth had ever in his life said anything about philosophy. "Metaphysics?"

Sunday school sprang into life for Booth, his favorite teacher's endless love of Aquinas. "Have you read Aquinas?"  
Brennan had been talking about Aristotle earlier. He wondered absently if they had meetings to decide what would be this weeks attempt at establishing common ground with him.  
Zack was gnawing on the name of Aquinas like -- Booth remembered vividly an ex girlfriend having given him a copy of 'Wittgenstein's Poker' and he remembered the descriptions of Wittgenstein manually wrestling with an argument, exactly the same way that Zack screwed up his face looking for what he was supposed to do with where Booth had taken his attempt at light, friendly dialogue.  
Looking for a pattern in the chaos.

He tried it from this new angle, copying Zack and just trying to create a spread that gave Zack some purchase in the conversation.  
"Wittgenstein?" Zack knows who that is, but Booth has to keep going, and link the thought to all the ones that came before it. Or, you know. Some of them. "Didn't he write about.." He wracked his brains. He remembered some of it. He didn't think it was actually the same as metaphysics though. "Math?"

Zack's eyes lit up again though and it looked like he wouldn't have to make it work any better - something had hit and they could be friends again for a little while.

He glanced at his cigarette as Zack blundered through some topic that made him flush with embarrassment but Booth didn't consciously even accept the sentence, seeing instead the length of the tobacco as the suitors candle that he had seen in some magazine selling shawls and desktop fountains. A taper to court by.

He laughed and laughed while Zack told him something really disturbing about himself and what "they" had been talking about - some reading of Wittgenstein as a mystic more than a philosopher - an enchanter just like Zack had called himself a familiar and Booth had looked up animism - because Zack really did 'believe' in a certain alienated sense those things he made jokes about and mentioned off hand. It was just that he retained choice through belief to a substantially higher degree than most people.

Booth tuned back into his speech at the end and turned his laughter at the thought of Zack the earnest young gay boy into rueful chuckling at the 'too trueness' of Zack's occasional firtation with his own genuinenly creepy version of serial killer panache.

The taper burned out and the laugh, shared distortedly through the darkening and brightening lens of their sometimes getting it, was something like a high point for the day.

Hell, the week really. 

\---------

Once, after a reasonably calm day, Booth tapped Zack on the shoulder.  
"Ok. So what is a book you have read recently that I might also have? That's usually pretty safe."  
"Naked Lunch." Zack says it fast and looks like he regrets it immediately after. Booth holds up a hand.  
"No, actually I've read that, a friend of mine in the service gave it to me. Fucked up book though."  
Zack nodded his head, layed out his comment like a puzzle piece. "I was also given it by a friend and found it disturbing. I recently re-read it to refresh the impression of them in my mind."  
He looked at Booth and patted his pocket but Booth looked down and shook his head, smiling. "We can talk without props." Booth looked away but not before seeing the sudden turmoil on Zack's face as he struggled to find his feet with the change in their formula.

Booth sighed and thought of arguing with Brennan about religion. He tried to give Zack ground to recover if he wanted it: "That book made me glad I was a catholic."

"It made me glad I was a heathen."

Booth laughed and held up his hands as he walked away.

\----------

"I also think that about us, or I think I do. Yes. You would rather be Evilyn, from He-Man, and I would rather be Skeletor."

Conversation number 16 Booth cant believe he's had with him, but something about his appalling eagerness makes applying the 'well maybe this time it will all make sense' rubric worth it again and again.

Or, easy, any way, and so not requiring any particular reason or worth.

An unforced choice, even if the copying and the thinking and the subject choice is all in some way coercive, all the time calculated and measured out and meaning some trillion things. Zack doesn't abridge consent. Ever.  
He is very, very cautious about that. He wears the caution like the kind of religious ban that Brennan lacks which is why she has a gun, actually able to convince herself that good things are worth killing for.  
Zack doesn't, and is back here instead of in the desert where he and Booth both know and never talk about him definitely being able to counterfeit humanity well enough to have stayed. His decision to make the army fire him and bring him home to catching murderers, the profession Booth believes is the most honorable one in the world.

Zack had, in one of his rambling discussions of it (endlessly, never letting it far out of sight although never addressing it head on either, God-forbid. Or animating spirits. Or healthy presumption on the side of possibility. or -Whatever-. forbid.) -- had compared it to Cuchulain, a reference Booth had actually gotten although he forgot now whether or not he had succeeded in the complicated gesture-code-ritual needed to tell that to Zack in any coherent fashion at the time.

But yes, he had had an illustrated book of myths as a child and knew what 'conflicting gesae' meant and he even got why the subject of whether or not Booth liked him in the face of being the person the most like him, literally, and Booth never once starting a conversation with him, was related to it. He had to like Zack because Zack was Brennan's. He couldn't like Zack because Zack made his skin crawl in a decidedly well justified way, according to his very proffessional instincts. Hence: no conversations, despite all the apparent similarities. 

"Except these." He had remarked, ashing definitively.

So. He kept trying. It made Brennan obscurely happy, he thought, to imagine them bonded in some fashion like what she saw as teacher to student or something.  
Now, in the present, he had agreed that yes, the gesae represented a 'point of dissimilarity' between the two of them, which was terribly important to the overarching superstructure of what Zack was trying to say to him.

Zack looked at him. "So then you can't be surprised that I'm afraid of you. You aren't allowed. If you are seriously freaked out by my ability to sociopathically delineate between people then you have to believe that I am literally afraid that despite everything if I said something that really bothered you you would destroy me." He paused. "Like physically."

Booth looks at him. "I guess so? Insofar as I would rather be He-Man, which would make you Teelah and if you showed any signs of becoming Evilyn than yeah, obviously, I would kill you." 

Booth paused. He thought? For about the same reason?  
"Right?"

Zack shook his head and looked grave for a moment, but then recovered philosophically. "Dr. Brennan wouldn't. Which is why you're the hero and she's your sidekick in the overall. I'm a familiar, remember?"  
Booth thought about Brennan when she had petitioned for the gun, and her eyes when she waved it now. "I wouldn't swear to that man."

Zack went grave again. "I would. It's only worth it being the pet of something that wouldn't ever kill you. Everybody knows that, that's what being cherished is." 

\-----------

One Day Booth saw Angela reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and he brought Zack to stand over it and just pointed, utterly exhausted for the eighty fifth time and with no one to stand near but Zack who that afternoon had tried to explain to him that he thought if they shared an actual perspective for a moment he thought it might have serious impact for P-NP completeness research.

He had attempted also to frame the discussion with respect to a game he called 'Schizoid' and Booth had interrupted at that point to gesture at the book expressively while Angela drank coffee.

Zack smiled and nodded but looked sad as he mentally assessed the comparison and considered it from what Booth was sure were 82 disasterously alien directions. If this were a study, which Zack almost always looked like he could be participating in or conducting, he would be preparing to jot down a result. "And which of them do you think you are? When we are them?"

Booth looked at Angela who had looked over the book at him and shrugged.

She described having lost a level of the game to Zack, and Booth looked at her harder. She glanced over again and this time her shrug was for herself. "Hodgins. Don't look at me like that."

He stopped and when Zack came out the door a minute later he didn't say anything, but in his head he ran over scenes.

"Tim Roth is hot."

Booth sighed, breathing out smoke.

Zack nodded, then seemed to just put his shoulder into it. "Would it help you if I told you I wanted to watch you masturbate far more than I would ever actually want to have sex with you?"

Booth had frowned and shifted his weight to shove before he actually had registered the sentence, again. Zack was in mid-defensive wince, but was also nodding vigorously.  
"See? I actually find it really repulsive that you allow your feelings towards the sexual modalities of others to decrease their personal worth in your eyes. It's like, I feel the same about you as you do me, but in reverse. I can't specify the quantities exactly but I would say this is probably at least as hard for me as for you."

Booth narrowed his eyes and let the punch go.

\-------------

Booth talked to Brennan about it as infrequently as he could afford.

"Yes, Zack has spoken with me about it. I think he has been admirably direct. If I wanted to sleep with you - " Booth was cut off, interrupting - "Or engage in 'sexualized time' with you - I would pursue you until I had a clear answer - " Again - "And I understand also wanting, if I was going to continue speaking with you on any level of actual intimiacy, to pursue the source reasoning of that refusal, which you have given, in order to adjust my behavior to accommodate the critique implicit in that rejection."  
"It isn't a critique! I'm just straight!"  
"Well do you exhibit the traditional discomfort around artifacts of authentic homosexual culture of heterosexual males?"

"I don't know! I don't think so? I have had gay friends, I had a gay friend -in the army- which is not the easiest place to have one."

Brennan nodded. "Then it must be something else. Do you think he's ugly? That might be the answer. I think you are ugly." Booth's face fell, Brennan corrected deftly and swiftly, seeing immediately the miscommunication - "outside the scope of my sexual spectrum, rather, not to my taste. You have an extremely good body from the comparisons I have made."  
Booth switched gears from confused and upset to confused and uncomfortable without drawing a breath. He almost reached for a cigarette.

"I guess, Bones, but he bothers me."  
"I don't understand the differences between him and me, I guess. We share a number of psychological attributes."

Booth nodded, and this time he really -wanted- the cigarette. He looked at the road instead.

\------------

"Dr. Brennan is correct at least in her identification of my underlying belief that you do not like gay people."

Booth stared at him, this time bothering: "Does she hand you printouts?"

Zack smiled. "We talk often and lengthily. I think I am secretly the only person it is alright for her to be as wierd as she actually is around." He paused. "But then I probably multiply what would be percieved that way by others, so it might actually be a question of being 'worse' here to apply the valuative."

Booth considered it, said, "But you both don't have to when it's just you."

Zack nodded, breathing in the smoke easily now, not even tearing up as he once had. "Yes."

Booth almost let it go at that, just finishing up the cigarette, but he stopped again and looked at Zack. "But I don't not like gay people."

Zack screwed up his face. "You don't know any gay people. I'm the only person who might fulfill the criterion and despite being the single person with the most on-paper similarities with you in the lab you show no desire to deepen our intimacy level at all and you seem extremely uncomfortable literally any time I say anything that pertains to the sex act or analogous acts."  
"I had a friend - "  
"Agent Booth, it doesn't count when your friend is legally obliged not to be really gay. That's like, the definition of it not counting."

Booth shut his mouth, and considered a second play of the smoke break, some other way forward through the interrogation.

It wasn't -dis-similiar to his work, but it was friendlier. Or he thought it was. Most of the time. Right now Zack looked kind of sad, but kind of resigned too, like he hadn't expected this one to work out.

Booth didn't like the way that it looked.

"Did you ever smoke pot?"

Zack blinked. "Is that a deliberate non sequitur or am I failing to grasp an analogy?"

"Kind of. Did you?"

Zack shook his head. "I am less innocent than people seem to believe, but in many respects that mistake of theirs is grounded in a real lack of worldliness. I have never taken any drug that was not prescribed, and actually I have never had a prescription for any powerful opiates either."

Booth nodded. "OK, so you don't know what a shotgun is?"

Zack shook his head and started to explain the various ways and reasons that he didn't know what that was - Booth stopped him.

"Stay still. There are two ways you can do this, this is the easy way."

He took a deep drag and held it in his lungs. While Zack watched him Booth leaned in - "Here."

He breathed the smoke into Zack, who inhaled with his eyes wide open.

When Zack breathed out he was nodding and smiling, his expression a little starry which gave Booth something of a thrill.

"Yes. That is the kind of gay person you knew. Like that was a kiss."

Booth stopped.

"Is that what I was saying?"

Zack turned to head inside.

"That's what you said.


End file.
